Monthly archive: September, 2012

Delivering searing criticism on the psychosis of absolute power, Victor Serge’s fifth novel to be featured in my personal blog is a masterly work. The Case of Comrade Tulayev was written in 1942 and is situated in the context of the Great Terror in Soviet Russia orchestrated by Joseph Stalin. In the sequence that constitutes the ‘defeat-in-victory’ trilogy (preceded by Midnight in the Century [1939] and succeeded by The Long Dusk [1943-5]), the novel intersects in several subtle ways with Serge’s other books. The Case of Comrade Tulayev is a chronicle of the Moscow arrests and show trials in the 1930s that pulls in a myriad of characters as well as the overbearing appearance of ‘the Chief’, Stalin himself. It does so by offering at least two intersections to aspects present in Serge’s earlier novels. First, it offers a set of intersecting elements linked to specific characters that appear in the earlier books; second, it offers direct intersections on the theme of space and the state. How the spatial logistics of the state, how the modern state organises space, and how the state engenders social relations in space are thus a quintessential feature of The Case of Comrade Tulayev.

Debates on the ‘right to the city’ are proceeding apace with the recent publication of David Harvey’s Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution [2012]. In Harvey’s hands, the right to the city is a claim to some kind of shaping power over the processes of urbanisation, over the ways in which our cities are made and remade, and to do so in a fundamental and radical way. Here, of course, the main intellectual backstop is Henri Lefebvre’s Le Droit à la Ville [1968] that articulates a cry and a demand to transform and renew the foundations of urban time-spaces, or the way of living in the city. In exploring the spatial forms of the city, Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) has always been a chronicler of Mexico City (see ‘From the Death of Artemio Cruz to the Death of Carlos Fuentes’). His national epics, such as La región más transparente (Where the Air is Clear, 1958) have also located him as a cronista of modern Mexico, or one of its key pensadores (intellectuals-at-large), providing a vision of culture on a national scale, accompanying the community, guiding it through its dilemmas, consoling it in grief, and sharing in its triumph, albeit at times as an authorised voice of the state, as Claudio Lomnitz has noted. So what can one make of the publication of Vlad, first published in a collection Inquieta compañía [2004], then subsequently in the year 2010, the centenary of the Mexican Revolution and Mexico’s bicentenary of independence, and now in English translation with Dalkey Archive Press?

The publication of Carlos Nelson Coutinho’s Gramsci’s Political Thought in the Historical Materialism Book Series by Brill [2012] provides a wonderful opportunity to draw some attention to the debates on Gramsci in Latin America. This particular book is a translation of Gramsci: Um estudo sobre su pensamento politico [1999] and is an essential window through which to view debates in and beyond Brazil. It is written by one of the most hugely important intellectual figures in Latin America producing studies on Gramsci whose company would also include José Aricó, Juan Carlos Portantiero, or Dora Kanoussi, to name a few. Its publication in translation represents a really positive and agenda-setting attempt by the editorial board of the Historical Materialism Book Series to bring Latin American texts to a wider Anglophone audience and is to be much applauded. The appearance of Carlos Nelson Coutinho’s work in English leads the way in this respect and my hope is that additional texts in this series and others will follow. Notably, Verso also recently published Emir Sader’s The New Mole: Paths of the Latin American Left [2012]. What can engaging work from a Latin American context offer to past and present Gramsci debates?

Recommencing my series of posts on the novels of Victor Serge, I focus now on what Richard Greeman has recognised as the ‘cycle of resistance’ in the second informal trilogy comprising Midnight in the Century [1939], The Case of Comrade Tulayev [1942], and The Long Dusk [1946]. If earlier novels in the ‘cycle of revolution’ capture the conquest of space, notably Conquered City, then the later novels in the ‘cycle of resistance’ convey the statification of space. This refers to the production of political space through meaningful architectural forms; symbolic representations of state power; the organisation of territory and geography; and state strategies to shape, reproduce, and control production through industrial development, land use, transportation, and communication. The novel Midnight in the Century reflects the defeat of revolution and how the Soviet state bound itself to space: how state control is extended, shaped and reshaped by the production of space. The spatial dimension is therefore intrinsic to understanding the contradictions of state action and struggles for survival within this rendering of life at the hands of the Soviet machine.